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What is GeoLing and what does it do?

In short, GeoLing is a handy tool for performing statistical analyses on spatial data: You can use data from dialect surveys, transform them into smoothed maps (via density estimation), detect structures that run through the data and find groups of maps that share spatial features.

We developed this program with linguistic applications in mind, but that should not stop you from using it for any kind of spatially conditioned data.

Acknowledgements

GeoLing was written as a part of the project New Dialectometry Using Methods of Stochastic Image Analysis (project homepage), financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) between 2008 and 2014. All the work has been carried out by people associated with three institutions:

Download and installation

The software is written in Java – as Java runs on multiple platforms, there is one version for all users. Please make sure that the Java version running on your machine is up to date; updates are obtainable at www.java.com. The latest version of GeoLing and the accompanying guide are always available on this site.

Originally, the software was developed for and tested on the data of the Sprachatlas von Bayerisch-Schwaben (SBS). The corresponding database (that served as the basis for most examples in the guide as well) is supplied for demonstration purposes.

GeoLing is ready to use after unzipping a single file; no installation is required. The guide includes a detailed section on how to import your own data sets.